Stevo wrote:I like the icons, too. I'll try and package them for the repo.

Later...found and fixed a problem with the Mint theme appearing as a duplicate Gray theme instead of Mint in the settings, so I'm repackaging.

Stevo, another theme I like very much is adapta, and recently downloaded the theme pack here: https://www.xfce-look.org/p/1190851/
I love this theme on my gnome install, and doesn't look have bad on MX16 either.

We've had quite a bit of discussion recently on the developer's forum about the Adapta theme, and the stock teal highlights version is in the MX 17 test repo, as well as System 76's "pop" variant. I also figured out how to build less garish highlight versions that use indigo and blue-gray as selection colors, as well as the monochrome adaptdark fork. However, it seems that only gtk3 desktops really get the full benefit of Adapta, and xfce is still gtk2. And we all agreed that the stark white light colored theme in xfce, as you can see in that screenshot, was really not going to work for us.The dark themes do look a lot better, though.

Building Adapta from source requires a newer gtk3 than we have for MX 16; I assume that the different colored variants in your link are just the finished builds that are put in the download. Adapta starts out with just vector svg files and then generates bitmaps using Inkscape, as well as all the css files for the supported versions of gtk 3 (3.18 is the absolute lowest that is supported), during a rather lengthy build. There is a way to use multiple cores during the build by using the "parallel" package, though--that speeds up the builds a lot.

Stevo wrote:We've had quite a bit of discussion recently on the developer's forum about the Adapta theme, and the stock teal highlights version is in the MX 17 test repo, as well as System 76's "pop" variant. I also figured out how to build less garish highlight versions that use indigo and blue-gray as selection colors, as well as the monochrome adaptdark fork. However, it seems that only gtk3 desktops really get the full benefit of Adapta, and xfce is still gtk2. And we all agreed that the stark white light colored theme in xfce, as you can see in that screenshot, was really not going to work for us.The dark themes do look a lot better, though.

Building Adapta from source requires a newer gtk3 than we have for MX 16; I assume that the different colored variants in your link are just the finished builds that are put in the download. Adapta starts out with just vector svg files and then generates bitmaps using Inkscape, as well as all the css files for the supported versions of gtk 3 (3.18 is the absolute lowest that is supported), during a rather lengthy build. There is a way to use multiple cores during the build by using the "parallel" package, though--that speeds up the builds a lot.

I have just removed adapta, I see the incompatibility now as certain apps were looking horrible. Thanks for the very thorough education on the subject. I now understand just how complex these themes are. Oh, and I happen to love the "pop" theme as well, so it would be nice if these themes could be incorporated into MX in the future.

miker107 wrote:
I have just removed adapta, I see the incompatibility now as certain apps were looking horrible. Thanks for the very thorough education on the subject. I now understand just how complex these themes are. Oh, and I happen to love the "pop" theme as well, so it would be nice if these themes could be incorporated into MX in the future.

Adapta and Pop themes are already in the MX17 repos, even though MX17 is still some ways from being released. However, the dark variants all look so much better than the light themes. The reason is that in the light variants, the XFCE panel and whisker menu show up as a blinding bleached white. It's almost painful in its whiteness. You could change your panel settings to set it to a fixed darker colour instead of having it follow the gtk theme, but I'm not sure how to do that for whisker menu.

Of course, if you knew how to tweak the files in the Adapta/Pop light themes to set dark panels/whisker, that would be great.

As for the dark themes, while they show up quite nicely, a lot of impressive animated effects you see in gtk3 desktop environments are lost because XFCE is still a gtk2 desktop at the moment, at least in Debian Jessie and Stretch.

Like Stevo said, we were discussing this in the Dev Team forum, and these were some of my observations about Adapta in XFCE:

Re: dark theme -

1. It's very cool, I love the strong colours, and it's great on Gnome, Cinnamon and Budgie (gtk3) desktops, but it might not have the most visible/identifiable GUI elements in XFCE (gtk2). For instance, in gtk2, you don't have a lot of the mouseover and animated effects you have in gtk3. So a lot of the visual cues are lost, making GUI elements less visible.

2. Look at tabs in Thunar (gtk2). Other dark themes have properly visible outlines for things like active tabs. In Adapta-Nokto, it's so dark you wouldn't know there is a tab if not for the neon blue indicator light below the tab text. If you mouseovered a tab in Nautilus or Nemo file managers (gtk3 apps), the tab would "light up" but not in Thunar.

3. In gtk3 apps, when you click on a tab, a "ripple" of light goes through the tab. You don't get that in a gtk2 app.

4. Same with mousing over items in a folder in Nautilus/Nemo. You don't get that in Thunar or any other gtk2 app.

5. you can compare the difference in MX:
- galculator and Archive manager are gtk3 apps. Open the Preferences dialogue window for these 2 and mouseover all the GUI elements
- do the same with Thunar, any of the other XFCE applications.

miker107 wrote:
I have just removed adapta, I see the incompatibility now as certain apps were looking horrible. Thanks for the very thorough education on the subject. I now understand just how complex these themes are. Oh, and I happen to love the "pop" theme as well, so it would be nice if these themes could be incorporated into MX in the future.

Adapta and Pop themes are already in the MX17 repos, even though MX17 is still some ways from being released. However, the dark variants all look so much better than the light themes. The reason is that in the light variants, the XFCE panel and whisker menu show up as a blinding bleached white. It's almost painful in its whiteness. You could change your panel settings to set it to a fixed darker colour instead of having it follow the gtk theme, but I'm not sure how to do that for whisker menu.

Of course, if you knew how to tweak the files in the Adapta/Pop light themes to set dark panels/whisker, that would be great.

As for the dark themes, while they show up quite nicely, a lot of impressive animated effects you see in gtk3 desktop environments are lost because XFCE is still a gtk2 desktop at the moment, at least in Debian Jessie and Stretch.

Like Stevo said, we were discussing this in the Dev Team forum, and these were some of my observations about Adapta in XFCE:

Re: dark theme -

1. It's very cool, I love the strong colours, and it's great on Gnome, Cinnamon and Budgie (gtk3) desktops, but it might not have the most visible/identifiable GUI elements in XFCE (gtk2). For instance, in gtk2, you don't have a lot of the mouseover and animated effects you have in gtk3. So a lot of the visual cues are lost, making GUI elements less visible.

2. Look at tabs in Thunar (gtk2). Other dark themes have properly visible outlines for things like active tabs. In Adapta-Nokto, it's so dark you wouldn't know there is a tab if not for the neon blue indicator light below the tab text. If you mouseovered a tab in Nautilus or Nemo file managers (gtk3 apps), the tab would "light up" but not in Thunar.

3. In gtk3 apps, when you click on a tab, a "ripple" of light goes through the tab. You don't get that in a gtk2 app.

4. Same with mousing over items in a folder in Nautilus/Nemo. You don't get that in Thunar or any other gtk2 app.

5. you can compare the difference in MX:
- galculator and Archive manager are gtk3 apps. Open the Preferences dialogue window for these 2 and mouseover all the GUI elements
- do the same with Thunar, any of the other XFCE applications.

Thank you for taking the time to explain things. I am finding this to be one of the best linux forum experiences I've ever had, and I've been around a bunch over the last few years. I started noticing certain apps like the older version of conky manager for instance, would not display the menu tabs at all, and menu options were all scrunched up together. Made for a horrible experience so I removed the themes all together. Just downloaded the "victory" theme set from xfce-look.org and it looks pretty nice, using it now.

Hey, on xfce-look.org, does that one-click OCS-install button work for you like it does for me, or do you have to install ocs-url from the test repo to get it to work? If so, I'm thinking that would be very useful to have on the ISO.